David Antin

“A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.”

“While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.”

“I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.”

“When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.”

“I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.”

“I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.”

“I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.”

“I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.”

“I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.”